Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm

By Fred Pruyn

It must have been a daunting task to write the history of David
Bohm (1917-1992), scientist and mystic, who believed that images
always have a capacity to delude. However, this biography (1)
by F. David Peat, one of Bohm's friends and colleagues, is not
only very readable but also sympathetic and reliable.

David Bohm experienced a difficult childhood. Born in a Jewish
family in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he was raised mainly by
his father, a furniture store owner and assistant of the local
rabbi. Bohm held a negative opinion of his father and received
little encouragement from his mother, who often suffered from
mental illness. As a result, he sought inspiration in his own
world and, at an early age, showed the character of a genuine
truth-seeker.

From the beginning of his scientific career, Bohm placed more
faith in intuition as a way of arriving at solutions than in the
more common way of mathematics. When he arrived at Caltech in
1939, he found the campus disturbingly different from what he
had expected. He encountered a world of competition that left
little room for creative thinking and real physics. Peat writes
that Bohm's roommate "believed that Caltech students learned
physics through the act of problem-solving itself. But for Bohm,
understanding always involved probing deeper and deeper into underlying
assumptions" (p. 34). By this time, Bohm was accustomed to
regarding all phenomena as flowing from a deeper level of existence
and periodically withdrawing into that same unknown world. He
showed familiarity with the Hermetic axiom: as above, so below.

He also believed that by paying attention to his own feelings
and intuitions, he should be able to arrive at a deeper understanding
of the nature of the universe of which he was part. He saw the
universe as infinite and ineffable; he developed a vision of an
infinite number of hierarchies within hierarchies, which made
up what he called the implicate order. He found confirmation of
his mystic vision on television in the 1960s, when he saw a device
made of two concentric glass cylinders, the space between them
filled with colorless glycerin. The experimenter put a drop of
ink in the glycerin, and then turned the outer cylinder. As a
result, the droplet was drawn out into a thread, which gradually
became thinner and thinner until it vanished completely; the ink
had disappeared but still existed in the glycerin. When the cylinder
was turned in the opposite direction, the ink reappeared from
its enfolded, hidden existence. Bohm realized that there was no
disorder or chaos, but, rather, a hidden order.

Bohm's profound concern was the foundations of physics and quantum
theory; he did not shy away from taboos and stick to the safety
of accepted science, as so many scientists did and still do. As
a result, he did not have an easy career. On many occasions he
found himself neglected; he published several books that to his
disappointment were often ignored by colleagues. Nor did he become
a Nobel laureate, though he was a worthy candidate. Bohm also
suffered great distress when forced by McCarthyism to leave his
home country in the early '50s on account of the Marxist views
he held at that time. He found refuge in Brazil, but had a hard
time far away from home without friends and colleagues, and was
subject to bouts of depression. He again found himself threatened,
this time by a group of Nazi sympathizers who tried to scare him
off the campus. The situation became so serious that the head
of the faculty called for the assistance of a good friend of Bohm's:
Albert Einstein. Einstein wrote a letter intended for publication
to the Governor of the State of Sao Paulo:

[Bohm] has become deeply interested in the following questions.
Is it really necessary to assume that the processes in the molecular
domain are governed by chance? Is it not possible to explain the
present theory in such a way as to indicate that everything should
proceed by necessity, so that chance is, in principle, eliminated.
. . . I have had in the past the greatest confidence in Dr. Bohm
as a scientist and as a man, and I continue to do so. -- p. 148

Later, when living and working in Britain, Bohm suggested to his
students that they experiment with a new language that consisted
only of verbs, which he called the rheomode, in an effort to do
justice to the transcendental nature of the world. He recognized
that our earliest perceptions of the world are of transformation
and flow, but that something happens to us by the time we reach
adulthood; in his opinion, the culprit was language. Bohm's ideas
on the rheomode are fascinating, but the response from many professional
linguists was discouraging. However, in the last year of his life,
he met with a group of Native Americans (Blackfoot, Cheyenne,
Ojibwa, Micmaq, and Soto), and was struck by their strongly verb-based
languages and their "process-based vision of the world."

In the 1970s Bohm met Krishnamurti and became involved in his
movement. They had many discussions, and Bohm became trustee of
one of his schools. However, his confidence in Krishnamurti was
dented after the latter's death, when it emerged that, although
he advocated celibacy, he had kept a mistress who had several
abortions. These revelations contributed to the mental crisis
Bohm was passing through at that time.

In the 1980s David Bohm and his wife, Saral, came in contact with
the Dalai Lama, and they had several discussions. The Dalai Lama
once joked that Bohm had become his physics teacher, although
"when the lesson is over I forget everything" (p. 300).
On one occasion, David Bohm fell ill and the Dalai Lama sent for
his personal physician, who diagnosed Bohm's blood as too thick.
The doctor said he would send to Dharamsala, India, for medication,
but the Dalai Lama insisted that the treatment should begin immediately,
and gave Bohm some special tablets to take. On another occasion
he sent his personal physician to examine Bohm at his home in
London.

David Bohm died in a taxi as he was being driven home from work.
He had just been putting the finishing touches to a book on quantum
physics, co-authored with his collaborator Basil Hiley. This book
--The Undivided Universe (1993) -- marks the culmination
of Bohm's life-long effort to develop an alternative interpretation
of quantum physics, one which rejects the role of chance, and
instead posits the existence of subtler forces acting from hidden,
implicate levels of reality, in order to explain the sometimes
puzzling behavior of the subatomic world. (2)

Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm
is an inspiring book, well documented and illustrated. It presents
a compelling picture of a great scientist, a man who dared to
question orthodoxy and to introduce new and radical ideas into
science, but who suffered neglect and misunderstanding, as so
many truly great men have.